Leeway Cottage (15 page)

T
he truth was, once America was in it, Sydney
enjoyed the war. She hated being without her husband and she hated the sad things that happened to people, but there was plenty to like.

 

The war for her was like being in the spring musical, except it ran for more than two nights. It was intense. It was full of drama. People who had always seemed to have everything were suddenly undone by grief. People no one ever appreciated, like herself, or like Homer Gantry, had exciting new roles to play; they had new jobs or appeared in crisp uniforms and made gallant jokes about the uncertain future. She enjoyed the world of women banding together with new time for each other now that their men were away. And while Laurus was safe in London translating things and playing the piano, Sydney was the hero in the family; she was having a baby.

She was one of those women who seemed to have been born to be pregnant. She'd had one week of morning sickness, and that was that. She ate well and slept well. Finally, something she was better at than her mother.

She met her mother, Mrs. Christie, in Abbott's grocery in Dundee in late June of 1942. It surprised them both, to find themselves face-to-face at the turning of the canned-goods aisle, each clutching her ration book.

“Sydney!”

“Lucky guess?”

“You're up early this year, dear,” said Candace as they brushed their jawbones against each other.

“So are you. Mother, this is my friend Gudrun Ostlund. My mother, Mrs. Christie.”

Candace accepted Gudrun's outstretched hand. Gudrun was tall, blond, with a long-limbed, slim-hipped grace, and something sad around the eyes. Terribly pretty, Candace would tell Bernard, a classic Norwegian. Gudrun told her what a pleasure it was to meet her. Candace herself looked weary, almost for the first time Sydney could remember.

“When did you get here?” Sydney asked.

“Last night.”

“Is…your husband with you?” She couldn't make herself say “Bernard.”

“Yes, but he's having a quiet morning. You're looking well, dear.”

“Thank you.”

Candace appeared quite struck, in fact, at the sight of her daughter. Here she was, trying to understand, was a can of peaches
worth
twelve ration points? Did Bernard like them enough? Yet here was Sydney, confidently pushing a cart loaded with things like Spam, with a wedding ring on her finger, a high round belly proud under her blouse, and a lovely friend with a charming accent. Almost as if this were a version of a daughter she could take an interest in. “And you're feeling well?” she asked, gesturing vaguely at Sydney's middle.

“Happy as a pig in slops,” boomed Sydney, for the pleasure of watching her mother flinch.

 

“She hated being pregnant,” Sydney told Gudrun, a little more audibly than Gudrun would have spoken in public, when Candace had wheeled her cart off toward the dairy case.

“Did she?”

“Claims she threw up every day for eight months. Loved to tell people that in front of me. We always wanted more children but she had herself fixed.”

This startled Gudrun. Fixed? We?

“My father wanted more children. He wanted six. And I wanted sisters in the worst way.”

“I see.” Candace the unloving. Too selfish to have children. Candace, prepare to be shamed by your daughter, the earth mother.

Candace appeared again.

“Excuse me…”

“Yes?”

“I'm supposed to get oleomargarine…” She pronounced it “margareen.”

“That's what you have in your hand.”

“But it's white. I don't think Bernard can eat that.”

“The color is inside the package, Mrs. Christie,” Gudrun said.

Candace turned the package in her hand, baffled.

“There's a tube of yellow dye inside. You squeeze it into the bag with the oleo and squish it until the yellow is all through. It's rather fun,” Gudrun added. “Children love to do it.”

Candace looked as if she didn't think, somehow, that her daughter was going to be over to help her squish her margareen. She thanked them and left again.

 

“I don't think she's shopped for her own groceries in her life,” Sydney remarked as they pedaled toward Carleton Point with their bike baskets loaded. “The cook always did the marketing.” Now, though, many of the servants were working in factories for better pay and the pride of the war effort. Portia Chatto, for instance, was canning fish in Belfast. Even if Velma was at The Elms, Candace wouldn't have the gasoline to send her to town separately with the chauffeur, when Candace had errands in town herself. Rationing was a great leveler.

T
HE
L
EEWAY
C
OTTAGE
G
UEST
B
OOK

It had been a month of real peace for her in the midst of a very sad year; her husband's country was conquered, her own (it was felt) helplessly compromised, and she had lost the baby she was carrying the week after Erik left for induction into the U.S. Army.

Dundee reminded her piercingly of Dalarö, where she had spent her Swedish summers. In Leeway Cottage there were Swedish books on shelves in the guest rooms left by the Eggers family, including copies of books she had loved when she was a little girl. Sydney was in some ways a mystery, robust and loud and amazingly ignorant of any history but her own, but perhaps that was simply American. It was so uncomplicated to come from such a young country, with no ancient quarrels with the universe. They sailed. They picked blueberries. They went to concerts. They sat on the covered porches with an odd gaggle of women from the town whom Sydney had gathered to knit for the war effort. Gudrun read
Lorna Doone
aloud to them as their needles clacked and summer rain dripped from the eaves and weighed down the hollyhocks and dahlias in the beds below.

L
aurus has asked again and again to be allowed to
go into Denmark to join Hammer. Again and again the answer was no. He could not melt unseen into the population; a person known in music circles all over Europe cannot drop from the sky with a cover story that will fool anybody. The enemy knows entirely too much already about SOE's damaged plan; the tale was told quite fully by Bruhn's body and the smashed radio and the footprints drawing a picture of Hammer's confusion and distress. The Germans haven't found Hammer himself, but they want him badly and are vigilant in an entirely new way.

Without explosives from England it takes a home-grown saboteur hundreds of pounds of materiel to make a bomb. There are ways to annoy the enemy; you can punch a hole in a gas tank, then light the resulting fuel puddle and torch the odd motorcycle or staff car. But it's hardly worth the risk. Without help, home-grown resisters can't accomplish much, and if they can't accomplish much how do they make themselves known, to London or each other? And in London, SOE is so stunned by losing Bruhn that their whole plan for Denmark is stymied. Their only important collaborators inside Denmark are some Danish military intelligence officers code-named the Princes, and they have a different vision from the Bruhn plan. They don't want sabotage. They want somnolent quiet, so they can build an underground army under the Germans' noses. When the time comes, cunningly dozy disarmed Denmark will rise up under the Princes' command and smite everybody. This plan has the advantage, for the Princes, of accruing maximum control and ultimately power to them. Otherwise, it's quite a gamble. Where is the proof that the Princes
can
build an underground army? If they're wrong and Danes don't flock to them, as they are certainly not doing at present, it will be impossible to tell until it's too late.

Still. In the spring of 1942, the Princes' plan is the plan. Meanwhile Hammer has been doing what he can on the ground. One result of his work is that a leading Danish politician, Christmas Møller, has taken the great risk of fleeing the country with his wife and family via Sweden to Scotland to London, where he expects to become the de facto leader of the Free Danes. He expects, with reason, that he will be advising on military and political matters and leading the Danish Council. Unfortunately, the Princes have briefed Møller misleadingly on SOE's plans and their own, causing him to put his feet wrong all over town in his first months in London. SOE is dismayed; they don't like to work with people they haven't trained themselves, and they find him ill-prepared for the work; he was the best man available for the job, but he is not the man SOE wanted. Møller, a true patriot who wants passionately to be useful, is instead largely sidelined and passionately furious. And Laurus, who also wants passionately to be useful and further thinks the Princes' plan will fail, is assigned the task of managing Møller.

For this, he is missing the birth of his first child. And he cannot tell any of it to Sydney.

B
ABY GIRL MOSS BORN
3:14
AM STOP
.
8
POUNDS
2
OZ
.
ALL WELL STOP GLADDY
.

Gladdy sent this wire to Laurus in London.

Sydney gave birth on August 8, 1942, at Seaside Memorial Hospital in Dundee. The labor was fast and furious and unremembered by Sydney afterward, as it was the age of “twilight sleep,” an amnesiac drug mixed with morphine given to laboring mothers that did not so much ease the pain of childbirth as erase the memory of it afterward. The labor rooms were well away from the waiting area in any well-run hospital, so although there was much howling, those who waited for news heard none of it.

Gladdy, in spite of the extreme strangeness of being a guest in what had been her own house, had come up from steaming Philadelphia to wait with Sydney for the birth, and she arrived not a moment too soon. Sydney summoned her from sleep near midnight on the second night of her visit. Gladdy pulled on clothes, snatched up Sydney's little satchel packed for the hospital, and drove through the blacked-out village with Sydney panting with pain on the seat beside her. Her friend waddled away through two swinging doors between two nurses, and Gladdy settled down anxiously, and missed her mother.

There was only one other person waiting with her, an older woman across the room, wearing a housedress and a hairnet, who alternately dozed and smoked, taking deep anxious drags on Chesterfield cigarettes and blowing the smoke out through her nose. There were no young fathers here, and no young male doctors either. Gladdy and the older woman both sat up straight, blinking stinging eyes, whenever someone appeared through the double doors. When the nurse-midwife finally poked her head into the waiting room and said “Mrs. Crane?” Gladdy, who had been dozing with eyes open, thought for a brief excited moment between dreams and waking that she had had a baby herself.

After sending the telegram and getting a very few hours' sleep in her old bedroom at Leeway, Gladdy rode her bike in the morning light back to the hospital to sit with Sydney. She brought the
Bangor Daily
and read aloud. She witnessed the first scandalized skirmish between the nurses and Sydney, whom they caught walking to the bathroom by herself.

“Mrs. Moss!” Thulia Carter scolded. “You could hemorrhage!” Normally, mothers stayed in the hospital for two weeks after a birth. For the first week they lay on their backs and waited for the “twilight sleep” to get out of their systems. At the beginning of the second, they were allowed to sit up and dangle their feet down over the edge of the bed.

“Such baloney,” said Sydney as they captured her and put her back in bed.

Gladdy was sitting in the hall knitting when Candace and Bernard arrived, emerging from the hospital elevator with flowers, an enormous plush elephant (where had that come from—luxury fabrics were all disappearing into the maw of the war effort) and a large box from Halle Brothers, Cleveland, that they must have brought with them in June.

Candace embraced Gladdy. “We simply couldn't wait to see our first grandchild.” There was a note of eagerness in the voice. “How are they?”

“Blooming. Sydney is feeding her now, but we can go in as soon as they're finished. The baby looks like you, Mrs. Christie.”

“Does she really?” Again, the pleasure, the warmth.

“You'll see. Especially around the mouth. She's a very pretty baby.” Gladdy told Candace all about the birth, how brave Sydney had been, and how fast the labor. Bernard sat with his hat on his knee and looked down the hall into the distance.

The nurse came out of Sydney's room with the bundled child.

“Mrs. Carter?” Gladdy called. “The baby's grandmother…”

Thulia Carter stopped and displayed the baby's face and the one tightly curled hand that lay near her cheek. Candace put her hand to her mouth, gazing.

“So
tiny…”

“We can go down to the nursery after. They'll let you hold her. But come in and see Sydney.”

 

“Mother!”

“Hello, darling!”

Sydney looked actually pleased to see her. “Hello, Bernard. Did you see the baby?”

“She is
simply
cunning.” Candace ventured close to the bed and put down her package at Sydney's feet. “Have you chosen a name?”

“Eleanor.”

“Eleanor!” said Candace.

“I wanted to name her Tofa, for Laurus's favorite aunt, but Jews don't name babies for relatives who are alive. So we named her for Mrs. Roosevelt.”

Mr. and Mrs. Christie took this speech quite well, for anti-Semitic Republicans.

“The flowers are beautiful,” Sydney added.

“I'll get a vase from the nurses,” said Gladdy. She went off with the flowers.

“I brought this for the baby,” Bernard said, thrusting the elephant at Sydney. “Babar.”

“Thank you.”

So far, everyone was still beaming. Sydney admired the big Babar from every angle, then tucked him into bed beside her, and Bernard looked pleased.

“And this is for you.” Candace handed over the big box.

“Presents!” said Sydney. “How nice, Mother!” She undid the ribbon and paused with pleasure over the tissue paper, enjoying the moment. This felt wonderful. A baby in the nursery, her mother here and not being a bitch, and expensive presents.

She folded back the tissue paper. There lay a gleaming lavender satin nightgown, with ecru lace around the neckline and the wrists. Sydney lifted it out and put the satin to her cheek. “Mother! It's just gorgeous!”

“There's a bed jacket too…” There was. In matching satin, quilted, with ribbons at the neck, and tiny mother-of-pearl buttons.

“Do you want to put them on? We'll turn our backs.”

“I'll put on the jacket. I can't use the nightgown for now, but I will when I—”

“Why can't you, dearie? Don't save it…you deserve it now!”

“No, I mean, I can't while I'm nursing. I have to be able to open down the front.”

Bernard suddenly turned and went to the window. This was not a conversation he could be privy to. The pictures it brought to mind!

“While you're…what?”

Gladdy came back with the lilies and foxgloves in a vase. “Aren't they splendid?”

“Nursing. Breast-feeding.”

“What, like a…”

Sydney waited. Like a…peasant? Immigrant? Negro?

Gladdy had put the vase on the bed table and grasped the situation. She said, “It's very modern, Mrs. Christie. It's natural.”

“So is giving birth in the field!”

“And better for the baby. In Europe it's very common.”

Sydney was working her way into her satin bed jacket. This was all getting too female for Bernard. “I think I'll nip down to the cafeteria for a bun,” he said.

Nobody said a word to stop him.

“It was a very nice thought, Mother, and I'll save the nightgown for when Laurus comes home.”

“Yes. That will be nice.” Relief. New topic. “And when will that be?”

Gladdy was placing a chair for her near Sydney's bed. Candace sat down in it while Gladdy brought another for herself from the hallway. This was Sydney's first two-visitor event.

“No way to tell.”

“And what do you hear from him?”

“He dreams of fresh oranges.”

“We'll have to get some for him when he's home.”

“Yes.”

“And he's safe, do you think?”

“Unless a bomb falls on him. He mostly gives lunchtime concerts at the National Gallery.”

“It's very good, they at least let him use his talents. You know the Toogood boy, Arthur…”

“No, I don't, but go on.”

“Yes you do, dear, they live out in Hunting Valley, his father's the—”

“I never met him, but please go on.”

“Well. He is a doctor, he was one term from finishing at Western Reserve. He enlisted, and they put him to work in the
kitchen
on a submarine, did you ever?”

“No.”

“Peeling carrots. A doctor!”

Sydney looked out the window. It was always like this. Her mother started to talk about her world as if it were Sydney's, as if Sydney didn't exist except when she was in Candace's line of sight. She hadn't moved to New York, or married a Dane or had a baby, she was still right there in Ohio, knowing what Candace knew, seeing what Candace saw, as if they were sharing a brain.

There was a silence. Candace tried to start over.

“I'd like to go down and see the little one in just a minute, but I want you to know how thrilled I am . . . Sydney. Your father would be so proud of you.”

“Thank you, Mother.”

“And you're quite well? No ill effects?”

“My stitches hurt like hell when I pee, but that's all.”

Candace flinched as if a bedpan had been emptied over her head.

“Nobody warns you about that.” Sydney pressed her advantage. “Did that happen to you?”

“I'm afraid I don't remember.” Candace looked at her hands in her lap. Was there no safe ground between them? Then she thought of something.

“Oh, and darling! I've enrolled her at the Madeira School.”

“You've done
what
!”

Now Sydney was sitting straight up, her eyes fixed on her mother like flamethrowers. Candace didn't know what she'd done this time. But here they were again. Where they always were.

“Oh, for heaven's
sake,
Mother.”

Sydney turned to stare out the window again.

After a silence, Candace said, “Well—look at the time. I better run.”

When she was gone, Sydney said defiantly to Gladdy, “See? It's her baby, not mine.
The Madeira School!”
She imitated her mother's accent.